It has become increasingly common in the printing industry to produce multi-layered printed sheet materials having special visual effects. These printed sheet materials include trading cards, phone cards, post cards, greeting cards, posters and the like. Prior art processes do not allow for fast and efficient production of such a multi-layered printed sheet material. In prior art methods of producing such printed sheet materials, it is necessary for ink applied to a layer of the sheet material to completely dry before the sheet material can be stacked for further processing. In this regard, the wet ink on the sheet material becomes smeared, smudged or distorted when a second sheet material is placed on top of the wet ink. Accordingly, the prior art methods require a long ink dry-time before the sheet material can be stacked for further processing. This long ink dry-time slows the production process and increases inefficiency.
Furthermore, in prior art production methods stacking of the sheet material during processing also creates handling problems. In this respect, whenever the sheet materials are stacked, the lack of a separation between consecutive sheets in the stack, creates difficulties in separating individual sheets for further processing. This difficulty also slows production and creates inefficiency in the manufacturing process.
Furthermore, prior art multi-layered printed sheet materials do not reflect light so as to produce an image having depth, dimension, contrasts, glow and brilliance. In this respect, the prior art printed sheet materials reflect light in a manner which typically gives the image on the sheet material a flat, one-dimensional, dull appearance.
The present invention overcomes these and other drawbacks of the prior art sheet material production methods and the prior art sheet materials.